The design of packed bed reactors is often challenging, requiring much experimental trial and error to investigate kinetics, heat transfer and fluid flow in order to come up with a final reliable design.

Until recently, resolving particle scale geometries has prevented CFD from assuming some of this experimental workload. This webcast highlights a fully automated process for modeling, meshing and simulating packed beds of arbitrary complexity using DEM (Discrete Element Modeling) to fully resolve the geometry of the packed beds. Participants see how this new approach acts as a perfect complement to existing experimental techniques, allowing researchers to quickly consider the influence of various trial and error scenarios, so that only the most promising solutions need to be submitted for experimental testing.

One of the unique benefits of such spatially resolved simulations is the detailed insight into packed bed reactors. For example, the local velocity may be analyzed to highlight regions of locally accelerated flows, or to detect zones with stagnant or backflow. Based upon these findings, attendees learn new ways of how an efficient optimization can be performed.

This webcast explores this automated DEM-based approach to creating CFD simulations of fully resolved packed beds, including a discussion of how the approach has been extensively validated.